The 129 million dead trees throughout California’s state and national forests are now serving as matchsticks and kindling.

With California on fire once again in the North and the South parts of the state, Gov. Jerry Brown continues his bizarre claims that devastating fires are the “new normal” and a result of climate change.

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Yet, the same climate change impacts private lands as public lands, but private forests are not burning down because they are properly managed.

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McClintock said for decades, traditional forest management was scientific and successful – that is until ideological, preservationist zealots wormed their way into government and began the overhaul of sound federal forest management through abuse of the Endangered Species Act and the “re-wilding, no-use movement.”

Traditional forest management had simple guidelines: thin the forest when it becomes too difficult to walk through; too many trees in the woods will compete with one another, because the best trees will grow at a slower rate.

The U.S. Forest Service used to be a profitable federal agency, McClintock said. “Up until the mid-1970s, we managed our National Forests according to well-established and time-tested forest management practices.”

“But 40 years ago, we replaced these sound management practices with what can only be described as a doctrine of benign neglect,” McClintock said. “Ponderous, byzantine laws and regulations administered by a growing cadre of ideological zealots in our land management agencies promised to ‘save the environment.’ The advocates of this doctrine have dominated our law, our policies, our courts and our federal agencies ever since.”

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Today, only privately managed forests are maintained through the traditional forest management practices: thinning, cutting, clearing, prescribed burns, and the disposal of the resulting woody waste. And notably, privately managed lands are not on fire.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield said Monday that the Ebola outbreak in conflict-ridden Congo has become so serious that international public health experts need to consider the possibility that it cannot be brought under control and instead will become entrenched.

If that happened, it would be the first time since the deadly viral disease was first identified in 1976 that an Ebola outbreak led to the persistent presence of the disease. In all previous outbreaks, most of which took place in remote areas, the disease was contained before it spread widely. The current outbreak is entering its fourth month, with nearly 300 cases, including 186 deaths.

If Ebola becomes endemic in substantial areas of North Kivu province, in northeastern Congo, “this will mean that we’ve lost the ability to trace contacts, stop transmission chains and contain the outbreak,” said Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, which hosted the briefing on Capitol Hill that featured the Ebola discussion with Redfield.

In that scenario, there would be a sustained and unpredictable spread of the deadly virus, with major implications for travel and trade, he said, noting that there are 6 million people in North Kivu. By comparison, the entire population of Liberia, one of the hardest-hit countries during the West Africa Ebola epidemic of 2014-2016, is about 4.8 million.

The outbreak is taking place in a part of Congo that is an active war zone. Dozens of armed militias operate in the area, attacking government outposts and civilians, complicating the work of Ebola response teams and putting their security at risk. Violence has escalated in recent weeks, severely hampering the response. The daily rate of new Ebola cases more than doubled in early October. In addition, there is community resistance and deep mistrust of the government.

Some sick people have refused to go to treatment centers, health-care workers are still being infected, and some people are dying of Ebola or spreading the virus to new areas. An estimated 60 to 80 percent of new confirmed cases have no known epidemiological link to prior cases, making it very difficult for responders to track cases and stop transmission. In late August, the United States withdrew some of the CDC’s most seasoned Ebola experts who had been stationed in Beni, the province’s urban epicenter, because of security risks.

From The Raconteur Report:

And if you’re playing the home game, we’re currently at Level 8 (moving to 9) out of 34 on the Global Apocalypse Scale. Small potatoes, IOW. Until it’s not.
Logarithmic growth will sneak up on you that way.

Only about 37% of American adults bothered to get a flu shot this past flu season. That’s actually a decrease from the previous season, when about 43% received one. Partially as a result, 80,000 Americans died from the flu. On the flip side, we did buy more organic food than ever before. READ MORE

Pai is following up on an FCC letter sent to 13 companies in May, asking them to develop a “call authentication system” to prevent the use of “spoof” numbers used by spammers. This latest letter asks for an answer as to what the companies are doing to meet that requirement by November 19.

Among the companies addressed are AT&T, Verizon Communications, T-Mobile, Alphabet, Comcast, Cox Communications, Sprint, CenturyLink, Charter Communications, and Bandwith Inc. Many of those companies do not “have concrete plans to implement a robust call authentication framework,” according to FCC staff.

As a retired Telcom engineer, my opinion; Caller ID could and should be abandoned. As far as stopping the spoofing goes, the Caller ID is a separate data field in the call record from the billing number (has to be). The billing number will always be correct, if the billing number and the caller ID are different, then block or send the true billing number.

Some companies or users had valid reasons for allowing those two data fields to be dissimilar; Doctors or Police that didn’t want the home number to be sent, individual agents (Insurance, etc.) might be out so the Corporations main number could be substituted, and so forth.
But the abuse has gotten so bad, most people think twice before answering the phone anymore. Next step, shutting the phone off when not on a call.

Whitelists of allowed numbers would be a help but the stupid operating companies want to charge extra for that, for a problem that they created.

Researchers have mapped out a series of internet traffic hijacks and redirections that they say are part of large espionage and intellectual property theft effort by China.

The researchers, Chris Demchak of the United States Naval War College and Yuval Shavitt of the Tel Aviv University in Israel, say in their paper that state-owned China Telecom hijacked and diverted internet traffic going to or passing through the US and Canada to China on a regular basis.

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China Telecom is able to divert the traffic by announcing bogus routes via the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) that governs data flows between Autonomous Systems, the large networks operated by telcos, internet providers and corporations.

After the traffic was copied by China Telecom for encyption breaking and analysis, it was delivered to the intended networks with only small delays. Demchak and Shavitt said.

Such hijacking is difficult to detect as China Telecom has multiple points of presence (PoPs) in North America and Europe that are physically close to the attacked networks, causing almost unnoticeable traffic delivery delays despite the lengthened routes.

China in comparison does not allow overseas telcos to establish PoPs in the country, and has only three gateways into the country, in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. This isolation protects the country’s domestic and transit traffic from foreign hijacking.

Remember when the (Never to sufficiently damned) Obama Administration gave away control of Internet routing to the Globalists? And now we’re here. It gets worse every year. And will until the USA starts playing hardball against the Chinese. As the article suggests…

…then an appropriate defense policy in response could state that no traffic to or from the US or ally is allowed to enter a China Telecom PoP in the US or in the ally’s networks,” the researchers suggested.

Such a policy could be inserted into BGP routing tables as required for automatic implementation.

President Trump would do it, but it would be very hard to enact if we lose the House.